Summer Reading
As time and people pass, new publications are now coming out regarding Cleveland’s and Collinwood’s more infamous history. I picked up two recently published biographies which both touch on the neighborhood’s most well known mobster, Danny Greene.
The first was “Feritto, An Assassin Scorned” regarding Ray Ferritto written by his widow, Susan DeSantis-Ferritto. Though out of Erie, Pennsylvania, he made many connections with Collinwood’s transplanted criminal element while living in California , such as Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno, Julius Petro, Frank “Skinny” Velotta, Bob Walsh, and Phil Christopher. Ferritto and Walsh would later be contracted and kill Petro in the parking lot of the Los Angeles airport in 1969. During the power struggle for control of the Cleveland mob in 1976, there would be 37 car bombing in Cuyahoga County. After several failed attempts to eliminate Danny Greene, it would be Fratianno who would recommend Ray for the hit to the then head of the Cleveland mafia, James Licavoli.
The second is “Brancato, Mafia Street Boss” written by his grandson Frank Monastra. Frank Brancato is acknowledged as responsible for a number of murders in Cleveland’s corn sugar wars during Prohibition, including that of the Porrello brother’s who then controlled the illegal liquor trade, on the behest of the Mayfield Road Mob’s Frank Milano. Though John Scalish was head of Cleveland’s mafia from 1944 until his death in 1976, Brancato was the one people would deal with directly on their behalf.
It was Brancato who took notice of Danny Greene in the clubs, and who recruited him as first a collector/enforcer, as the leader of Cleveland’s Longshoreman’s Union 1317, and later in the attempt to organize and control independent waste collectors.
“Ferritto, An Assassin Scorned”, by Susan DeSantis-Ferritto, 2012, Ragpaper Press
“Brancato, Mafia Street Boss”, by Frank Monastra, 2013, Brighton Publishing LLC
William McCulloch
Amateur local historian